Wednesday 30 May 2012

Who is this Tydder?





Thanks to a link from Stuart Horsman for the subject of this post;

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-18240901

'The ‘Tudor’ name for the royal family was hardly known in the sixteenth century. The almost obsessive use of the term by historians is therefore profoundly misleading about how English people of the time thought of themselves and of their world, the more so given the overtones of glamour associated with it. The royal surname was never used in official publications, and hardly in ‘histories’ of various sorts before 1584.'

When Henry Tudor came to light as the leading opponent of Richard III, invading England from France to become King Henry VII, he described himself by his peerage title ‘Richmond’, not as ‘Henry Tudor’. He was always called Richmond in subsequent sixteenth-century accounts of his life before becoming king, including Shakespeare's Richard III. ‘Tydder’ was used by Richard, and subsequently Perkin Warbeck, to draw attention to his allegedly low social origins; that no doubt explains why Henry himself and his successors avoided using the word.

Discuss!

P.S. some more figures coming very soon!

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